


nothing exists without you

by Alemantele



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, Philosophy, seriously this is mostly just a lot of philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-17 19:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4678376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alemantele/pseuds/Alemantele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What really happens in those black market philosophy meetings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing exists without you

**Author's Note:**

> “...The existence of the company itself is therefore something of a moral/ethical question, the kind that philosophers consider in their secret black market philosophy meetings.” -Episode 52

This is not a story about you.

You sit in the dark room illuminated only by the flickering of lights from outside the broken windows, and you are not alone. There are three people with you, all of them with their heads down and eyes flickering across the thin notebooks they have brought to the meeting, moving in complete unison.

You are the only one who has not brought a notebook, has not even brought a pencil. You sit quietly, fidgeting, looking down at your thin and trembling fingers occasionally.

Then, as if signalled by the blinking red light atop the peaks of some far away mountain, the scratching of pencil on paper stops.

One of the three others--a woman with masses of hair so long and so thick it reaches the ground--clears her throat.

The other woman--this time with hair so grey and wispy it might’ve not been there at all--look over, her pencil slack in her hand, a strange smile lifting up the corner of her mouth.

“So what have we all brought today?” the first woman, her voice low and husky. She looks around the room. Her eyes are entirely dark, even the sclera succumbing to the call of the void, so you cannot tell what she is looking that, only that she is looking around.

This is not a story about you.

You spread your fingers on your thighs, feeling a strange sort of tightness in your throat, as if a tiny man were pushing out as hard as he could in your windpipe and there just wasn’t enough room for you to swallow or breathe. You hope the woman with the dark eyes does not look at you, though there is no way for you to make sure she does not.

The second woman grins, bearing shark-like sharp teeth. She is wearing glasses, on a thick chain that is attached to her pulsing red cardigan, and her mouth seems so impossibly dark and wide. When she swings her head, the chain catches on her bun, and you see how gnarled and twisted her fingers are when she reaches up to free the caught strands of hair. “Someone’s brought a person,” she rasps, and her eyes--normal, though shot through with blood vessels--hone on to your gaunt face.

Your eyes flicker over to the last person in the room, the man who is so very utterly nondescript, the man who has claimed to be your friend for the past twenty years, and the man who dragged you here in the first place.

He does not smile. He does not even look at the woman with the gaping mouth, only twiddles with his pencil slightly.

“I left my copy of _An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision_ on the kitchen table,” he says, and then nothing more.

The silence says everything else for him.

The silence, and your fidgeting.

Even now, you remember flipping through the book, fascinated, wanting to know what they meant about _thinking_ and _higher understanding_ and _our universe_.

Your friend had sat down, explained some things to you, and then the two of you were locked in a debate at two o’clock in the morning, each of you casting more glances at the heavy curtains in your window than each other for fear of the secret police coming.

 _This is highly illegal_ , your friend had said. _Very dangerous. Are you sure you want to come?_

You think about your discovery of _a priori knowledge_ , and _rationalism_ , and your joy at hearing Berkeley’s theories now as you stare down at thin fingers. They were always too thin, people told you, not useful for anything. _This one,_ they would say, _this one should stay at home_. _Let your partner do all the heavy lifting! You’ll never lift anything with those fingers of yours!_ You close your eyes, flex your hands, and think about how you have no fingers, that your fingers only exist because people look at them, that they are only important because people make it so and you can lift anything you want because nothing really exists. _Nothing really exists._

 _Yes,_ you had said, your own normal eyes blazing. _Of course._

Now, you sit in silence, looking back down at your thin fingers, wondering how heated debates in hushed rooms could be so wonderful compared to the thick empty silence of now.

Your friend tilts his head.

The woman with the dark eyes laughs, a hissing spitting laugh that seems to be sharped than the broken glass of the windows. “You should be more careful next time,” she murmurs. The woman with the gaping mouth nods eagerly in agreeing.

Your friend shrugs. “I found another philosopher,” he said instead.

You heard a harsh inhale from the woman with the gaping mouth. “Another one?” she asks roughly.

This was explained to you, before you came, but the idea of it still thrills you. Their meetings, the explanation went, were secret and underground and highly illegal. Their subject matter more so. Philosophy was one of the most illicit of activities, and hence control on the dealers was only second to the security surrounding the dog park. Finding the agendas of a new philosopher was a huge discovery. Your friend smiled then, just a little.

“Who is it?” the woman with the gaping mouth hissed, when it seemed he would not say anything. “Who is it?”

Your friend flipped his notebook, where on it was written two words. Two words with nine letters that were all utterly incomprehensible until someone came around and read it aloud. tings only exist when people look at them, you think, staring hard at the two words. Nothing really exists.

It is a name. “John Locke,” you heard yourself say, almost reverently, despite the fact that you had absolutely no idea who this man was.

All eyes--well, except for perhaps the ones belonging to the woman with the dark eyes, you still couldn’t really tell where she was looking at any time--turned to you. You sat on your thin fingers.

“Well what does he say?” the woman with the dark eyes growled after a while, her own pencil and pad hovering eagerly in front of her.

Your friend’s mouth stretched wide in a great big grin then, and you felt a chill run down your back. Your friend never smiled.

“Most people agree that the United States of America was founded under the philosophy of John Locke,” he says, his voice a harsh whisper instead of the bold confident smooth tones your friend usually affects. “You know,” he says, even if you do not know. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

You do not know this yet, because there was not enough time for him to explain it to you, but your friend has just spoken the three words that are perhaps the most taboo things that this room has seen in a very, _very_ , long time. No one speaks of the world outside Night Vale. No one speaks of philosophy on how to run an entire country. You do not know this, but the woman with the gaping mouth is thinking now of when she had stumbled upon a copy of _The Republic_ in the library, and had to burn it for fear of the secret police coming to _collect_ it. And her. She still has the ashes. They are always with her. They are too dangerous--and valuable--to let loose onto the world.

The woman with the gaping mouth pushes up her glasses, fixes your friend with a sharp stare. “Where did you find this,” she hisses.

Your friend shrugs, only slightly, stares right back at her bloodshot eyes. “Somewhere you should not go,” he says.

The woman with the dark eyes waves her hands, sending an already broken lightbulb flying. “Enough, enough,” she rasps, her impossible eyes looking everywhere at once. “Tell us about this John Locke, I haven’t heard some new philosophy in too long.” Her eyes roll. You are not quite sure how you know this, but when you look at her pale face and hear her gasping breaths, you know her eyes are rolling back.

Your friend takes in a deep, elated breath as well, and then he starts to speak.

You close your eyes and hear his low voice wash over you. He speaks of a world where there are things plenty for all, where the government is not supposed to take part in the affairs of the citizens save for maintaining safety. _Preposterous,_ is your first thought, mind flashing with hooded figures and helicopters whirring above your head. You can almost hear it now, the blades, that is, chopping and chopping, louder and louder.

Then, you think about it. You really think about it, and you wonder what it would be like to be able to walk your dog in a dog park.

“This is much better than Plato,” the woman with the gaping mouth says, her voice a soft murmur for once. Her eyes are closed, and she sits in the chair, her pencil having stilled because your friend has finally stopped talking, and the woman is sitting bonelessly, her pulsing cardigan slowing down with the beat of her heart.

The woman with the dark eyes is hunched over in her seat. She makes a low humming sound, and you think she is angry.

Your friend is still grinning, triumphant, and something inside you shrinks back at this other side of him.

There is a stillness in the room. The light outside flickers.

“Locke’s ideas are ridiculous,” the woman with the dark eyes says, eons later.

The woman with the gaping mouth turns, springing out from her relaxed position, eyes wide and snarling mouth wide open. “Are you insinuating that citizens should not have the rights to do whatever they wish?” As she speaks, you smell the rotting violets on her breath, and you cringe back.

“Well Locke doesn’t define his parametres very well at all, does he,” the woman with the dark eyes retorts. “He says the government is not allowed to interfere unless the action does specific harm to others, but where is the line drawn? My personal choices affect the public all the time!” Her voice is not loud, but it is an intense whisper, breath hissing through the air.

“How?” the woman with the gaping mouth splutters, her cardigan pulsating quicker and quicker. “I say the government has no right to regulate everything all the time,” she says, and this particular phrase is spoken in almost a murmur. Everyone in the room pauses, just for a second, and then you all wait for something to happen, for the secret police to hear, for the sign you all need to disband.

When it does not come, the woman with the gaping mouth looks back to the woman with the dark eyes. “If I wish to run my library with booby traps in the Helen Hunt biography section, then why should anyone stop me? If anyone comes in it’s their own fault.”

You raise your hand sheepishly.

The woman with the gaping mouth spits. “What?” she asks you, the chains on her glasses rattling.

“Well the government doesn’t actually do anything in your library, does it?” you ask hesitantly, remembering the day you spent trapped in the Summer Reading Program, for one hoping that the secret police would drop in.

The woman with the gaping mouth snorts. “Sheriff’s been banging at my door every morning, kid,” she says dismissively. “Wants to do something with the Helen Hunt section. I didn’t ask what, mostly because I hate the Sheriff but also because I can’t hear him over the machine gun fire.” She grins widely. “Bloodstone circles are better at keeping the gunfire out than bulletproof doors any day, and it’s even better when they get redirected to the Helen Hunt section itself! Ha! That’ll show the Sheriff.”

You slide down in your chair. “Oh,” you say, because there isn’t really anything else to say at that point. A sort of whistling breeze glides through the broken window, ruffling your hair.

The woman with the gaping mouth chuckles. “Locke’s got the right idea, that man.”

The woman with the dark eyes barks a short laugh, though it is more animal than human, and flickers her long dark hair back. “Well then what happens when word gets out that we have booby traps and evil librarians--” here she smiles darkly at the woman with the gaping mouth “--and tourism goes down? Night Vale is the number one family tourist destination, after all, and it wouldn’t do to have our revenue go down from that, would it? See that would affect everyone in the town. This is why Locke makes no sense.”

Then, before the woman with the gaping mouth has the chance to retort, the sound of helicopter blades fills your ears.

Your friend, who has been silent up until this point, narrows his eyes and stands. “I think this wraps up our meeting,” he says.

The woman with the gaping mouth turns to the other. “We’re not done here,” she snarls. “You failed to consider the minimalistic harms to others against the huge benefits of the individual.”

The woman with the dark eyes shrugs, stands, and pulls her hair around herself. “That’s _so_ consequentialist, darling,” she says, and twirls. You watch her hair whirl around, and then she is only a dark mass of tornado like hair, and then she is not there anymore.

In her place is a fluttering sheet of dark dark dark paper, with white words written on it in spindly handwriting. _Hobbes is better anyways,_ it says.

The woman with the gaping mouth throws her hands up. “Nasty and brutish, ha. Describes her well enough.” Then she bites her thumb, blood as red as her cardigan welling up at the cut, and smears it on a lock in her chain.

A second later, she is gone too, leaving only you and your friend standing in the empty room and the wind blowing in through the broken window.

“Will we get caught?” you ask hesitantly.

Your friend shakes his head, gently.

“How do we get out?” you ask.

Your friend smiles. “Trust me,” he says, holding out a hand for you to take.

You grab it, solidly feeling his warmth, and then you are walking through the door.  

You walk out the door together, your friend leading the way, the secret police barely noticing the two of you. Dimly, you are aware of the rapid sound of machine gun fire coming from the library, and you laugh a little to yourself.

The breeze rolls through the small desert town, and you see the light from the Moonlite All-Nite diner up ahead. “Let’s go get something to eat,” you hear yourself saying.

Your friend laughs, then, and you grin widely at that. “Yes,” he says, “let’s.”

His hand is still in yours. You feel it, solid and so wonderful, and tell yourself that nothing really exists unless you tell it to. That your friend’s hand only feels so welcoming and warm because you want it to be so. Nothing really exists.

The two of you walk into the diner together.

 


End file.
